Aurora Gallery

Though science does well to explain the aurora, no one would’ve predicted such a phenomenon in advance of actually experiencing it. It just seems improbable that charged particles flow from the sun, interact with the earth’s magnetic field, and then collide with different molecules in the upper atmosphere, each which gives off a different color of light. There’s even a mirror image of every aurora that you see in the north happening simultaneously in the southern hemisphere, a function of polar symmetry in the earth’s magnetic field. Yes, really. Yet superseding the physics of aurora is a profound sense of awe that the aurora rouses in us. Here are a few images to remind us what nature is capable of.